George Carlin on Earth Day
George Carlin complained that save-the-earth environmentalists “don’t care about nature in the abstract …only as a clean place to live”.
(You can it watch here.) He was obviously unaware of the vast base of environmental writing that examines nature from every level of abstraction that is, well… abstractionable.
Why so angry about a clean place for us to live, if that’s just the extent of it? With every life support system on earth in decline under the crush of 7 billion people, with a daily net appearance of 200,000 more, working for a clean planet seems like something worth doing.
His target as always is self-important, ridiculous people – (guilty here!) which we first got from Jonathan Swift and Gulliver a long time ago. But George kept it fresh – and funny. Mostly. This bit of his hatin’ on environmentalists as all nothing but shallow Volvo-driving yuppies, is right up there at the top of his misanthrop-o-meter and right alongside his various papal decrees like: “don’t vote” and “kill your children”.
Saving the earth as a needless “arrogant” activity is certainly true to his general outlook. “I root for the destruction of humanity”, he said, and wanted to watch the “decline of civilization in the afterlife on a heavenly CNN.”
My only question: Why is one who arrogantly imagines a responsibility to “save the earth” more worthy of scorn that one who arrogantly imagines a right to grind it up for money?
He must have been hating those people as well when he wrote:
Oh beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticide grain,
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
So George thanks for all the laughs. Now, it’s back to work saving the earth for me, because doing nothing and heaping scorn is not a working option.
How’s that CNN working for you?
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